Published Articles

The latest shooting rampage of 26 people, including six adults and 20 children in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, is a senseless tragedy, and words cannot convey the horror and the magnitude of the loss of innocent life. The second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was carried out by 20-year-old Adam Lanza (photo, left), a loner with a personality disorder — and in critical need of psychiatric evaluation and treatment. Once again, these deadly rampages are the result of failure of the mental health system.

Consider the case of Jared Loughner, a 22-year-old disturbed individual who shot and attempted the assassination of former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. He also killed five others, including an innocent 9-year-old student and a judge, and wounded fourteen other people in 2011. There were signs of psychiatric illness and social pathology, that should have alerted those around him and called for mental evaluation and psychiatric treatment. But Loughner, like Lanza, fell through the obvious cracks.

The case of Loughner in Arizona (photo, right) is particularly revealing because a consensus has been...

In the book, Castro's Secrets — The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine (2012), author Brian Latell, a professor, scholar, and retired CIA officer who had been active in foreign intelligence for 35 years, relies extensively on information provided by half a dozen Cuban defectors and several retired CIA officers. However, the most intriguing and reliable revelations (i.e., pure facts without any embellishment or speculation) come to light from Florentino Aspillaga Lombard ("Tiny"), the most knowledgeable and valuable foreign intelligence officer to ever defect from Cuba's powerful Directorio General de Inteligencia (DGI).

1987: The Cuban Year of the Spy

Tiny Aspillaga defected that fateful summer in 1987 in the midst of the turbulent and historic years of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika — but still four years before the total collapse of the Soviet empire. (Reagan with Gorbachev, photo right) Aspillaga had served with distinction in the elite ranks of the DGI and had even received a personal commendation from Fidel Castro. After Aspillaga began working with the CIA, he immediately exposed dozens of Cuban double agents, who had infiltrated...

In a recent article, Bill Ferguson, a local columnist for The Telegraph (Macon, Georgia), attempts to give readers a strong political soporific, as to deaden their need to remain informed and vigilant when it comes to guarding their Second Amendment rights from usurpation by a UN treaty.(1) But before that, he takes a swipe at conservatives, while intimating that he himself is a moderate Republican and was even a Romney supporter in the last election.(2) Once again, we have a liberal writer masquerading as a reluctant Republican or centrist, as to make his snake oil elixir a bit more palatable and convincing to his more conservative readership!

With derision, sarcasm, and subsequent lampoonery, Ferguson writes, “Based on what I have been hearing from many of the people around me since the country re-elected a certain liberal Democrat for another four years, such a collapse [of civilization] is imminent... I’m not sure exactly what all is supposed to be involved in this liberal remaking of America…”

As to the “remaking of America,” let me refresh his memory with the following presidential misdeeds in the realm of economics: The prolonged domestic misery of 23...

I have visited 70 countries all over the world. There is no healthcare system that provides the excellence that the USA system does. Much of what you read in the press is not true.(2) Virtually everyone in the USA can obtain healthcare; for those who are “involuntarily uninsured” the number is near 4% not the 47% that everyone quotes.(2,11) I would fully support some system to provide care for the involuntarily uninsured in any system or country. Furthermore, in the socialized medical systems there is a large amount of evidence that shows that cancer survivals in European socialized countries are worse that in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan.(5,6) Cuba is mentioned with these four, but its data is not believed. The survivals in England are the worst on the continent. Why?

Also the longevity statistics from countries around the world are based on infant mortality, which is defined differently in many countries.(8,9) In some European countries any child born less than 12 inches in length is declared stillborn and not included in their statistics. The same applies for those weighing less than a pound. So the infant mortality statistics of the USA are worse than others...

Young Stalin by Simon Montefiore is a well-researched, well-written, absorbing, and authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin's early years. Following the usual formalities, the book begins with a tantalizing "Prologue," the audacious robbery and bloody bombing at the festive Yerevan Square in the center of the town of Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia). The heist, carried out on June 13, 1907 by a 29-year-old "Soso" (Stalin's nickname) and his band of Georgian gangsters, was orchestrated to help finance Lenin's revolution.

The terrorists made off with a huge, incredible sum of money, approximately 300,000 rubles or over $34 million U.S. dollars, with a buying power at the time an order of magnitude greater. Dozens of people, including Tsarist Cossack guards and innocent bystanders, were killed or wounded during the attack. The red terrorists detonated a number of powerful bombs that shook the center of the town. Nevertheless, it was a perfect crime; no one talked (even then Stalin ran a tight ship with hermetically sealed security) and no one got arrested.

Most of the money was funneled clandestinely to Lenin, who had authorized the young Stalin to carry...

The need for reducing gun violence is discussed along with the necessity for citizens to assume some responsibility for protecting themselves, their families, and their property from criminal elements because the police cannot physically be everywhere to protect us all of the time. The problem of sensationalization of gun crimes by the media, multiple shootings by deranged individuals, accidents with firearms, suicide rates, and children with guns are discussed.

The relationship of civilian disarmament in the context of tyrannical governments and genocide are also explored. Incidents in which liberty has been extinguished because firearms have been banned and citizens have been disarmed by increasingly oppressive governments, and the converse, countries where freedom has been preserved by armed citizens are also described.

We conclude that guns in the hands of law‑abiding citizens deter crimes, and nations that trust their citizens with firearms have governments that sustain liberty and affirm individual freedom. Governments that do not trust their citizens with firearms tend to be despotic and tyrannical, and are a potential danger to good citizens and a peril to...

The role of gun violence and street crime in the United States and the world is currently a subject of great debate among national and international organizations, including the United Nations. Because the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the individual right of American citizens to own private firearms, availability of firearms is greater in the U.S. than the rest of the world, except perhaps in Israel and Switzerland. Indeed, although the American people continue to purchase and possess more firearms, homicides and violent crimes have continued to diminish for several decades because guns in the hands of the law‑abiding citizens does not translate into more crime. As neurosurgeons, we can be compassionate and still be honest and have the moral courage to pursue the truth and find viable solutions through the use of sound, scholarly research in the area of guns and violence. We have an obligation to reach our conclusions based on objective data and scientific information rather than on ideology, emotionalism or partisan politics. — Abstract

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost...

Miguel Faria, MD, a neurosurgeon and Emeritus Editor of The Journal of The American Physicians and Surgeons, formerly the Medical Sentinel, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of Surgical Neurology International and its World Affairs Section, has written a two‑part Editorial on “America, Guns, and Freedom.” These essays address a very important topic to physicians everywhere, relate to the often, distorted media reports advocating the disarming of citizens, and the costs of health care of guns in the hands of citizens. Fundamentally, what he says is about the Liberty of every individual in the world from the tyranny of authoritarian regimes. In a recent book by Acemoglu and Robinson on “Why Nations Fail” (Crown Publishing, NY 2012), the authors describe how those intent on power and control have led to the destruction of governments and societies by disarming the citizens, which also leads to government control of medicine and the health of the individual. This factual information is critically important to all physicians to understand as citizens and to neurosurgeons, who care for these patients. These are outstanding reviews of the subject supported by fact and scientific thinking...

The upholding of ObamaCare by the Supreme Court in an unexpected 5-4 political decision is a travesty of American constitutionality. It is a sad day in the country when a knowledgeable Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court betrays the country and places himself and his legacy — not to mention the chants for "change" and "progress," and his obvious desire for a favorable, epochal association with the first African-American president — ahead of the moral and economic well being of the nation. I say this because the burden of ObamaCare will be laid directly on the shoulders of the already overtaxed and overstretched small businesses, entrepreneurs, and the American middle class who sustain this nation.

The liberal justices voted as we expected, for man is a political animal. But the deciding vote by Chief Justice Roberts, I posit, was cast to assert and define his personal legacy as stated above, and to ride the wave of the times of statism and collectivism, not to mention the alleged inescapable legal positivism of history.

It is always amazing to me how liberals quickly extend sanctity and infallibility status to the Supreme Court whenever the Justices issue a...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), more commonly referred to as ObamaCare, has become one of the most controversial pieces of legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled, 111th U.S. Congress during President Obama’s administration.

Despite significant political opposition and poll-after-poll evincing the American people’s strong dissatisfaction with a health care plan that was correctly seen as further socializing American medicine, ObamaCare was passed by the two houses of the U.S. Congress and signed into law by the president on March 23, 2010.

One stated goal of the plan is ostensibly to "expand access to insurance for nearly 30 million Americans" (photo, above). And to accomplish this ”reform,” the Obama administration has introduced the elements of compulsion — and more ominously, unconstitutional powers.

To increase access to insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans, ObamaCare forces insurance companies and managed care plans to extend coverage to people with pre-existing conditions; in effect, converting conventional rules of indemnity coverage (i.e., coverage for unforeseen medical illnesses and injuries)...

Fransini Giraldo is a Colombian girl who dances her own style of Salsa. In this video, she dances to the rhythm of Sonora Carruseles de Colombia, presumably in the Colombia countryside. Published July 16, 2013.